Advent and Diffusion within the Modern Dichotomy of States

Above all the current chapter (and the following chapter) supports a nomothetic understanding of the diffusion of FOI law. In their examination of the rise of FOI law, Colin Darch and Peter Underwood note that in order to ‘write an effective social history of the diffusion process, some degree of recognition of the idiographic character of access rights is necessary.’1 And they emphasis the words of Thomas Blanton:

almost every freedom of information law in the world today, came about not because of any sudden conversion to enlightenment philosophy or rationality, but because of specific conditions of competition for political power. Competition between parliaments and administrations, competition between ruling and opposition parties, competition between present and prior regimes, competition between bribe-takers and muck-rakers… the history of freedom of information in practice in the world is extremely varied and complex.2

While this is true, and demonstrated in the comparative case studies of China, Mexico and India examined in the thesis, it is also important to emphasize continuity in the diffusion of access rights. FOI law rose and initially spread amongst a historically unique set of modern states, and although each state adopted the law under ‘specific conditions

1 _{Darch and Underwood, Freedom of Information and the Developing World: The Citizen, the State and}

Models of Openness, 144.

2 _{Emphasis by authors. Ibid., 64, T. S. Blanton, in Japan-United States Symposium: The}

6: Macro-Historical View I: Emergence and Early Diffusion

of competition for political power’, there is a fundamental continuity across the earliest (and the latest) adopters of FOI law.

This chapter argues the early diffusion of FOI law, prior to its contemporary proliferation, can be understood by collapsing state forms of modern history into Lockean and Hobbesian groups.3 The major difference between the two state types is the nature of the relationship between the state apparatus and society within the historical structure of the ‘extended state’ (as discussed at 5.3).4 The chapter demonstrates how the law gradually emerged in the Lockean heartland where society, empowered with a degree of autonomy and power, was able to demand a ‘right to know’ (6.3 below); and how transparency law was stunted amongst Hobbesian states where the state apparatus held a substantial sovereignty over society that extended to information (6.4). However, the chapter also moves beyond the dichotomy to examine historical variation amongst both Lockean and Hobbesian state forms and how such variation is important in relation to openness and FOI law. For example, twentieth century Hobbesian states are divided between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and this further categorization is helpful in understanding variations in access to information (see 6.4).

As discussed in the previous chapter, the modern state developed in the seventeenth and eighteen century across Europe when capital classes emerged and events like the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution signaled the demise of feudalism and the absolutist monarchical state.5 The variety of modern states that have come into existence since that time can be understood as falling into either Lockean or Hobbesian forms.6 These formations differ on the grounds that the first is an organic model at the centre of the international political economy, while the second is a successive model to appear on the horizon as a contender: the Lockean state form emerged across a heartland spanning Europe and the New World as feudal and absolutist structures gave way to an organic rise in civil society from the sixteenth century onwards; whereas the Hobbesian

3 _{van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations, 65-98, ———, "A Lockean Europe?.",}

———, Global Rivalries: From the Cold War to Iraq, 1-12, ———, "Ruling Classes, Hegemony, and the State System," 16-20.

4 _{van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations, 65-98.}

5 _{See Chapter Five: ‘5.2.3 Modern World Orders and FOI Law.’ Also: J. Anderson and S. Hall,}

"Absolutism and Other Ancestors," in The Rise of the Modern State, ed. J. Anderson (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986).

6: Macro-Historical View I: Emergence and Early Diffusion

159 state form, on the other hand, largely emerged as a response by the periphery to the expansion of the heartland, as a contender model, aimed at competing with the heartland in modernization through state-led catch-up industrialization.7 The Lockean and Hobbesian forms have varied over the centuries in the rise and fall of world orders (as shown in Table 10), although each embodies a historically distinctive relationship between society and the state apparatus. 8

Table 10: Lockean and Hobbesian State Forms

Era Lockean heartland Hobbesian contenders

Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Liberal state (Britain)

Instrumental liberal state (US) Bonapartist state (France)

Late nineteenth to early twentieth century

Welfare nationalist state (Britain)

Welfare nationalist state (Prussia/Germany) Fascist- corporative state (Axis Powers)

Mid-Twentieth century

Corporate liberal state* (US/North Atlantic Bloc)

Redistributive party-commanded state (Soviet Bloc) Cartel state (South European/ American dictatorships)

Late Twentieth Century

Hyperliberal state (Thatcher/Reagan model)

Neo-Mercantilist developmentalist state (late industrializing Third World States)

*Cox (1987) uses 'neoliberal state' which more often is employed to denote what he terms the 'hyperliberal' state.

The Lockean state provided the basis for the emergence of FOI law and its early diffusion, while the periphery of Hobbesian contender states presented a barrier to the diffusion of the law outside the Lockean heartland. Jurgen Habermas has examined the growth of a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ that developed in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe and America to engage in debate over the general rules governing society and the state; this public sphere asserted a claim to self rule and popular sovereignty that elevated society above the state apparatus as a governing entity and, subsequently, the public gained, gradually and unevenly, a ‘right to know.’9 On the other hand, the state

7 _{Ibid., 80.}

8 _{Reproduced from Ibid., 85.}

9 _{J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of}

6: Macro-Historical View I: Emergence and Early Diffusion

apparatus within Hobbesian states has been mandated as a driving force within society and this generally prevented the cultivation of self-regulating civil society and the development of a public ‘right to know’; under the Hobbesian mode of state-society relations, the state apparatus is viewed as ‘being an entity unto itself and, therefore, under no obligation to furnish information requested by the citizenry.’10 The Lockean/Hobbesian dichotomy provides an understanding for the early emergence and diffusion of transparency law, but the dichotomy and the understanding it provides breaks down in the final decades of the twentieth century, when FOI law proliferated to every region of the globe. The breakdown of the Lockean/Hobbesian dichotomy and the proliferation of public sector transparency are examined in the second part of this nomothetic investigation, provided in the next chapter.